Halloween Part 2: Decorations!

Welcome back to The Chatterbox Blog. We’re going extra spooktacular this month for Halloween, but it’s coming with a few struggles. Today, I am going to discuss my frustrations with decorations!

As long as I can remember, I’ve loved to decorate for Halloween. Even after the initial depression of no longer going trick-or-treating door to door in my neighborhood, I still enjoyed putting on a nice display of lights and decorations to enhance the experience for trick-or-treaters. This year, I am struggling more than ever with getting things out and I blame it on one thing… QUALITY! Since my wife and I moved into our home, I’ve been spending a couple hundred dollars each year to build up my Halloween decoration stash and it has grown rather large over the years (same with Christmas lights/decor). This year, I start to get everything out and over half of my lights no longer work and some of the ones that DO actually work, only half of them work. The pumpkin lights have busted off of the bulbs and so on. This has put a great deal of frustration on me this year to the point where I’m not looking past Halloween! I have my giant spider web in between my two large trees with an inflatable spider and some orange rope lights on the front deck where I’ll be passing out candy. That’s it!

Why is it that nobody makes QUALITY decoration items any more? The same can be said about Christmas decor as well. Growing up, it seemed like my parents had the same few strands of lights and set around decorations each and every year. Then when a bulb went bad, you could actually buy replacements that didn’t cost as much as the original set of lights.

So yeah, this year’s Halloween for me is a bust! I’m not even there yet and I’m not as excited for it. I also think a part of the reason is that my baby girl is 3 this year and pay attention to more things and has become afraid of certain things like Freddy, Wolfman, etc. so it’s hard to get enjoyment out of displaying the things if it’s just going to frighten her.

In closing, I believe next year will mark the year I begin to create my own decorations and bring the display back bigger, badder, and better than ever. Aside from maybe some lights here and there, I will no longer buy Halloween OR Christmas decorations until the quality improves… or until they re-release the inflatable Burl Ives Snowman from The Rudolph Cartoon lol. Until next time…

Save Room 4 Love,

Brad (The Chatterbox)

P.S. Next blog, I will share my Pumpkin carvings. I’ve got a couple good ones this year that I’m looking to do. We’ll see how they turn out! 😀

see Brad if only Zoe liked her uncle Brian more she would be used to Freddy, Wolfman, etc. cant wait till my kids become big enough to watch horror movies. Im a big critic and Sherri doesnt appreciate my views, such as realism, scary-ness, etc.. Just the other day i put in the new Nightmare part 3 bluray to see what the picture looked like(by the way THE BEST nightmare…even though i fell asleep watching it) and i took it out before any gore and Brady said “hey i was watching that!, I want to see Freddy!!”. my kids…either they will love the horror genre or be serial killers…im hoping for the first choice!!

Definitely hoping for the first choice! I like that she is afraid of things. It’s just like with Lotso. She absolutely loved her stuffed-talking one until it clicked that Lotso was the bad guy. She now puts him away from the other toys. Kind of cool that she recognizes him as bad… even though Lotso was one of the coolest characters in a cartoon.

I haven’t got to watch much Horror movies lately. Amber and I started to watch Child’s Play this past weekend. She was saying how dumb it was when the doll was killing people but still only said “Hi, my name is Chucky!” How I knew it messed with her head was when Andy’s Mom was getting ready to throw him in the fire and Chucky’s face changed and he said “You Stupid B****!” Amber’s reaction “What the crap?” LOL she had never seen it, but always knew that my favorite line from the movie was when he was locked in the school closet and said “I promise I won’t kill anybody else.” classic!